Monday, October 25, 2010

Hi. Remember me? The guy who used to post 20-25 posts a month here? Yeah, that guy.

I was photographing storm clouds rolling in over a corn field out in the open countryside west of Chicago way back in September. Shooting in between passing cars. Finally I thought, why not? I waited for the next car to come by and shot just as it passed. For no other reason than that it might make for an interesting shot.

I pretty much missed autumn as far as getting colorful fall pictures for myself. Most of my weekends were taken up with photography gigs and my weekdays with processing pictures. And it doesn't look like things will ease up any time soon. Not that there's a problem with that. I'm thankful for the work, much of it repeat business and referrals from happy clients. Gotta love that.

Not sure about the fate of this blog. It may wind up going the way of other abandoned blogs. Maybe I can come up with a theme for the winter months and post a series of shots here. Maybe it becomes a showcase for the professional stuff I'm currently doing. Dunno for sure.

I'm now into by-the-seat-of-the-pants video production. Picked up a client that keeps me busy producing short videos. Getting some inquiries for making more videos from here and there.

Monday, October 04, 2010

I spent the month of September shooting pictures for a lot of people. Nothing wrong with that, but I was kept so busy, I didn't have time to make any pictures for myself. I did get to go out this past Saturday and do some landscape shooting just for me. Didn't come back with too much worth keeping, but it was good to get out and play with possibilities.

One of the things that going out on Saturday helped with was a senior portrait session on Sunday. Once the fairly standard selection of senior picture poses were in the bag, I experimented with environmental portraits, and I'm pretty happy with the results.

Nearly every shot from the session is lit with flash, but in such a way as to blend in with the late day sunlight. Sometimes the flash was the key light with the sun adding an accent. Other times I let the sun be the main light while filling in the shadows with flash. Katie's mom is standing just to the right of the larger tree in the picture above, holding a flash unit aimed at her daughter which was fired with a wireless trigger. Had there been no flash, the right side of Katie's face would have been dark.

For the most part, this was straight-ahead, no diffusers, stark nekkid flash. There wasn't alot of choice because a diffuser or umbrella would have gotten blown away by pretty strong winds. But it worked.

Besides helping to balance the ambient sunlight, the flash adds a little catchlight in the eyes, a little sparkle, a little life. Nice.